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7 September 2011

These are the good deeds [literally, things] which have no fixed measure: giving the crops from corners of the fields to the poor, giving the first fruits [to the Temple ], the appearance offering [offered in the Temple on certain holidays], acts of kindness and the study of Torah. These are the good deeds [literally, things] for which a person enjoys the fruit in this world, while the principle waits for him in the afterlife: honoring parents, acts of kindness, establishing peace between people, but the study of Torah is equal to them all.

Turkey’s Rage

When dealing with the anti-Israeli rage being whipped up in Turkey it would be wise to remember just exactly who the Turks are.

For those who don’t know what the punchline of today’s cartoon refers to:

“The Armenian Genocide was carried out by the “Young Turk” government of the Ottoman Empire in 1915-1916 (with subsidiaries to 1922-23). One and a half million Armenians were killed, out of a total of two and a half million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Most Armenians in America are children or grandchildren of the survivors, although there are still many survivors amongst us.

Armenians all over the world commemorate this great tragedy on April 24, because it was on that day in 1915 when 300 Armenian leaders, writers, thinkers and professionals in Constantinople (present day Istanbul) were rounded up, deported and killed. Also on that day in Constantinople, 5,000 of the poorest Armenians were butchered in the streets and in their homes.

The Armenian Genocide was masterminded by the Central Committee of the Young Turk Party (Committee for Union and Progress [Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyet, in Turkish]) which was dominated by Mehmed Talât [Pasha], Ismail Enver [Pasha], and Ahmed Djemal [Pasha]. They were a racist group whose ideology was articulated by Zia Gökalp, Dr. Mehmed Nazim, and Dr. Behaeddin Shakir.

The Armenian Genocide was directed by a Special Organization (Teshkilati Mahsusa) set up by the Committee of Union and Progress, which created special “butcher battalions,” made up of violent criminals released from prison.

Some righteous Ottoman officials such as Celal, governor of Aleppo; Mazhar, governor of Ankara; and Reshid, governor of Kastamonu, were dismissed for not complying with the extermination campaign. Any common Turks who protected Armenians were killed.”-more

-Dry Bones- Israel’s Political Comic Strip Since 1973

Greece and Turkey (1999)

Today’s cartoon is from 1999. Back in 1999 the secular state of Turkey was an ally of Israel and was warming up to Greece. Now, in 2011, the big news is that an increasingly Islamist and belligerent Turkey is threatening Israel. The news that Turkey is threatening Cyprus about Oil drilling in the Mediterranean is under-reported.

There’s this from the Cyprus Mail:

New Turkish threats over drilling

TURKEY’S EU Affairs Minister Egemen Bagis yesterday issued a number of threats at Cyprus in daily including one to send naval vessels to the drilling area.

Bagis was quoted in Zaman newspaper as saying that when explorations were made in the past, ships from the Turkish military fleet “were quick to make their way to the area”. -more

And could Turkey’s political shift be pushing Greece and Israel together? According to an Armenian Source:

Israel, Greece sign MoU in security sector

PanARMENIAN.Net – “Greek Defense Minister Panos Beglitis and his Israeli counterpart Ehud Barak, with whom he met in Jerusalem on Sunday, September 4 afternoon, starting his three-day official visit to Israel, signed a Cooperation Memorandum in the security sector, defencegreece.com reported.

“I come as my country’s Defense Minister to state our political will as a government, as well as the majority of the country’s political forces, for the two countries, the two governments, the two peoples, to work together so that we can further develop and deepen our bilateral relations in all sectors of mutual interest and concern,” Beglitis said.

This is the first visit by a Greek Defense minister to Israel and part of a cooperation memorandum agreed last year between Prime Minister George Papandreou and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while it is also taking place at a moment when Israel’s relations with Turkey are worsening, shaping new balance factors in the region of the Eastern Mediterranean.” -more

Your thoughts?

-Dry Bones- Israel’s Political Comic Strip Since 1973

Islamist Turkey

Get the full story from Barry Rubin who writes:

Two More Steps Toward Islamism

“In Washington DC they are still ridiculing the idea that Turkey’s government is Islamist, is working step by step to transform fundamentally that country’s state and society, or that it is closer to Tehran than to the United States nowadays or more friendly to Hamas and Hizballah than to Israel.

Yet anyone who actually talks to Turks or looks at daily life there—and that includes the U.S. embassy in Ankara—knew better.

First, a bombshell. No sooner have the heads of the armed forces resigned than the regime issues an arrest warrent for seven senior officers. The Turkish army is finished as a political force–partly thanks to the European Union insisting that it withdraw from a political role–while the courts are being neutralized and the media is being bought up. There is no institution left to prevent the current regime from Islamizing Turkey and fundamentally transforming its society.” -more

-Dry Bones- Israel’s Political Comic Strip Since 1973

the 2012 Campaign

The 2012 U.S. Presidential contest seems to have started

… and one issue is drowning out all the rest. Jobs.

-Dry Bones- Israel’s Political Comic Strip Since 1973

Presidential Betrayal (1991)

Today’s cartoon was drawn twenty years ago this week.

Back then, in 1991, it wasn’t President Obama, the 44th President of the United States, who was betraying America’s only real ally in the Middle East.

. . . back then it was George H. W. Bush, the 41st President.

Birds of a Feather?

-Dry Bones- Israel’s Political Comic Strip Since 1973

Perceptionsof Jews by Renowned Gentiles:

#1“Some people like the Jews, and some do not. But no thoughtful man can deny the fact that they are, beyond any question, the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has appeared in the world.”

— Winston Churchill

————————————————————————-#2“The Jew is that sacred being who has brought down from heaven the everlasting fire, and has illumined with it the entire world. He is the religious source, spring, and fountain out of which all the rest of the peoples have drawn their beliefs and their religions.”

— Leo Tolstoy

————————————————————————-#3

“It was in vain that we locked them up for several hundred years behind the walls of the Ghetto. No sooner were their prison gates unbarred than they easily caught up with us, even on those paths which we opened up without their aid.”

— A. A. Leroy Beaulieu, French publicist, 1842

————————————————————————-#4

“The Jew gave us the Outside and the Inside – our outlook and our inner life. We can hardly get up in the morning or cross the street without being Jewish. We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes. Most of our best words, in fact – new, adventure, surprise, unique, individual, person, vocation, time, history, future, freedom, progress, spirit, faith, hope, justice – are the gifts of the Jews.”

— Thomas Cahill, Irish Author

————————————————————————-#5

“One of the gifts of the Jewish culture to Christianity is that it has taught Christians to think like Jews, and any modern man who has not learned to think as though he were a Jew can hardly be said to have learned to think at all.”

— William Rees-Mogg, former Editor-in-Chief for The Times of London and a member of the House of Lords

————————————————————————

-#6

“It is certain that in certain parts of the world we can see a peculiar people, separated from the other peoples of the world and this is called the Jewish people….

This people is not only of remarkable antiquity but has also lasted for a singular long time… For whereas the people of Greece and Italy, of Sparta, Athens and Rome and others who came so much later have perished so long ago, these still exist, despite the efforts of so many powerful kings who have tried a hundred times to wipe them out, as their historians testify, and as can easily be judged by the natural order of things over such a long spell of years. They have always been preserved,however, and their preservation was foretold… My encounter with this people amazes me…”

— Blaise Pascal, French Mathematician

———————————————————————–-#7

“The Jewish vision became the prototype for many similar grand designs for humanity, both divine and man made The Jews, therefore, stand at the center of the perennial attempt to give human life the dignity of a purpose.”

–Paul Johnson, American Historian

———————————————————-

-#8

“As long as the world lasts, all who want to make progress in righteousness will come to Israel for inspiration as to the people who had the sense for righteousness most glowing and strongest.”

–Matthew Arnold, British poet and critic

————————————————————————-#9

“Indeed it is difficult for all other nations of the world to live in the presence of the Jews. It is irritating and most uncomfortable. The Jews embarrass the world as they have done things which are beyond the imaginable. They have become moral strangers since the day their forefather, Abraham, introduced the world to high ethical standards and to the fear of Heaven. They brought the world the Ten Commandments, which many nations prefer to defy. They violated the rules of history by staying alive, totally at odds with common sense and historical evidence. They outlived all their former enemies, including vast empires such as the Romans and the Greeks. They angered the world with their return to their homeland after 2000 years of exile and after the murder of six million of their brothers and sisters.

They aggravated mankind by building, in the wink of an eye, a democratic State which others were not able to create in even hundreds of years. They built living monuments such as the duty to be holy and the privilege to serve one’s fellow men.

They had their hands in every human progressive endeavor, whether in science, medicine, psychology or any other discipline, while totally out of proportion to their actual numbers. They gave the world the Bible and even their “savior.”

Jews taught the world not to accept the world as it is, but to transform it, yet only a few nations wanted to listen. Moreover, the Jews introduced the world to one God, yet only a minority wanted to draw the moral consequences. So the nations of the world realize that they would have been lost without the Jews.. And while their subconscious tries to remind them of how much of Western civilization is framed in terms of concepts first articulated by the Jews, they do anything to suppress it.

They deny that Jews remind them of a higher purpose of life and the need to be honorable, and do anything to escape its consequences.. It is simply too much to handle for them, too embarrassing to admit, and above all, too difficult to live by.

So the nations of the world decided once again to go out of ‘their’ way in order to find a stick to hit the Jews. The goal: to prove that Jews are as immoral and guilty of massacre and genocide as some of they themselves are.

All this in order to hide and justify their own failure to even protest when six million Jews were brought to the slaughterhouses of Auschwitz and Dachau; so as to wipe out the moral conscience of which the Jews remind them, and they found a stick.

Nothing could be more gratifying for them than to find the Jews in a struggle with another people (who are completely terrorized by their own leaders) against whom the Jews, against their best wishes, have to defend themselves in order to survive. With great satisfaction, the world allows and initiates the rewriting of history so as to fuel the rage of yet another people against the Jews. This in spite of the fact that the nations understand very well that peace between the parties could have come a long time ago, if only the Jews would have had a fair chance. Instead, they happily jumped on the wagon of hate so as to justify their jealousy of the Jews and their incompetence to deal with their own moral issues.

When Jews look at the bizarre play taking place in The Hague , they can only smile as this artificial game once more proves how the world paradoxically admits the Jews’ uniqueness. It is in their need to undermine the Jews that they actually raise them.

The study of history of Europe during the past centuries teaches us one uniform lesson: That the nations which received and in any way dealt fairly and mercifully with the Jew have prospered; and that the nations that have tortured and oppressed them have written out their own curse.”

–Olive Schreiner, South African novelist and social activist

————————————————————————-#10

“If there is any honor in all the world that I should like, it would be to be an honorary Jewish citizen.”